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From Kathleen Fox

The washboard hanging on the wall of our laundry room is no reproduction, artistically distressed to look pseudo-authentic. It’s just plain old. It’s been used. The wood is unevenly bleached and stained from standing in tubs of hard water laced with harsh soap. At the bottom of the ridged glass surface, the frame is worn away in the middle, no doubt from years of scrubbing dirty overalls.

I even know whose hands must have done that scrubbing. Not my grandmother (one of my sisters has her washboard), but my grandmother’s neighbor and close friend.

But let’s not wander too far into “olden days” stories about my grandmother scrubbing clothes on a washboard for a family of 12. At least by the early 1930’s, washboards may have been still used for extra scrubbing, but the bulk of the laundry was done with a washing machine. My mother remembers an early one with a wringer that was turned by hand—a perfect chore to assign to kids (in rotation, of course). The next one had an agitator and a wringer powered by a small gasoline engine. You can see one like it in action here.

This handy-dandy modern convenience still had to be filled with water heated on the kitchen stove and carried one bucketful at a time. Given the fumes from the engine, it would have needed to be used on the porch rather than in the kitchen. Pleasant enough in June; in January, not so much.

My hunch is that most people would agree they “should” invest for the future. My second hunch is that many of them don’t know how to start and are afraid of making serious mistakes.

One of our resident planners, Sterling Gray, summed up that fear eloquently in a post on the Kahler Financial blog: “I noticed that my friends and colleagues . . . saw retirement planning as a dark, treacherous terrain that they could never safely travel alone. Unsure of where to turn for help, they often chose to ignore saving for retirement completely . . .”

Here are some pointers to help you take the first steps into the unfamiliar terrain of investing.